1955: moving to the Front of the bus: during the Montgomery bus boycott, blacks used their wallets as weapons in the struggle for civil rights.

• Author: Roberts, Sam
• Position: TIMES PAST

On Dec. 1, 1955, a black seamstress in Montgomery, Ala., refused to give up her seat for a white passenger on a bus and was arrested. For Rosa Parks, 42, it was a simple act of defiance, but it had profound consequences: It ignited a yearlong bus boycott that would elevate the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence and galvanize the emerging civil rights movement.

Parks's refusal--50 years ago next month--to comply with city and state segregation laws was a pivotal moment in the civil rights struggle. It would culminate a decade after the Montgomery bus boycott in federal legislation aimed at guaranteeing equal rights to black Americans, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The legal grounds for challenging the South's system of Jim Crow laws and segregation had been laid the year before Parks took her stand, when the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that "separate but equal" public schools for whites and blacks were unconstitutional.

'JUST TOO TIRED'

In Montgomery, most of the bus company's customers were black and they had long resented having to board the bus in the back and give up their seats for whites. On the Cleveland Avenue bus Parks rode that day, 26 passengers were black and 10 were white. With the first four rows filled with whites and one white man left standing, the driver ordered Parks and three other black passengers in the fifth row to give up their seats. He was, he explained later, trying to "equalize" the seating arrangements. (Blacks and whites were not allowed to occupy the same row.)

When Parks, a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and former secretary of the Montgomery chapter, refused, she was arrested and briefly jailed for violating a city segregation law. She was convicted and fined $14. In addition, she was later charged with disobeying a state law that empowers a bus driver to assign seating. At the time she said she was "just too tired" to move, but years later she said in an interview that what she was tired of was discrimination.

THE BOYCOTT BEGINS

"When I declined to give up my seat, it was not that day or bus in particular. I just wanted to be free like everybody else," Parks said. "We did not wish to continue being second-class citizens."

The boycott that started four days after Parks's brave display of civil disobedience began with relatively modest goals. The group that had...